I stand by my statement, "if you have nothing to hide then what's the problem" I didn't dream that statement up, but you would think so by the way some people here react to it! I can remember hearing it back in school days when there was such a thing as discipline. You essentially have little in the way of privacy these days anyway. To quote a phrase said by John Laws. "the snivel libertarians", their everywhere.
I agree that if I have nothing to hide - and indeed I have not - I need not fear customs, state police, federal police or ASIO checking me out.
But wait a minute...
What if I have nothing to hide, but state police, federal police and ASIO check me out, decide I might be a terrorist, arrest me, throw me into jail without charge, forbid me to tell anyone where I am, finally haul me in front of a magistrate and on some imaginary charge have me stripped of my residency visa? Then throw me out of the country? For no reason - just because they can.
Can't happen like that in a liberal Western democracy? Seven point five million dollars of wasted government money
says it can.
Suppose an Indian pilot flies into Sydney, Customs uses BabelFish to machine-translate his Urdu email files into English and the mangled translation produces something they think is suspicious. Current laws allow the federal police to disappear the guy, virtually indefinitely.
These are the sorts of risks that, despite flyitboy's scorn, snivel libertarians see as increasing.
The thing that we fear is misinterpretation or simply wrong facts given to government bureaucracies that have increasingly draconian powers to act on tlhem without adequate judicial oversight.
A more extreme case of
totalitarian persecution occurred in the US in 2002:
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old wireless technology consultant. He was born in Syria and came to Canada with his family at the age of 17. He became a Canadian citizen in 1991. On Sept. 26, 2002, while in transit in New York’s JFK airport when returning home from a vacation, Arar was detained by US officials and interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Syria, where he was held in a tiny “grave-like” cell for ten months and ten days before he was moved to a better cell in a different prison. In Syria, he was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession....
On September 18, 2006, the Commissioner of the Inquiry, Justice Dennis O'Connor, cleared Arar of all terrorism allegations, stating he was "able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada."
A similar fate has befallen several other Canadians.
Of course the risk to each of us of this kind of misadventure is small. I don't lie awake at night worrying about it (although probably neither did Haneef or Arar).
But why would Customs officials hold up lines to search laptops when anything they might contain can be effortlessly imported over Australia's international fibre optic cables? And inconvenience the rest of us?
That really doesn't make sense unless they were close to hundred percent certain that some idiot had illegal content. Or have our security services completely taken leave of their senses? Will they be confiscating pilots' Leatherman tools next?